REFLECTION
Or, Critically Integrating Community and
Place-Based Learning in the Classroom
By
T. R. Johnson
Reflection is . . .
• The bridge between academic content and
service-experience in the wider community
• The activity through which learning takes
place
• Therefore it is of the most vital importance
and must be carefully planned as a rigorous
dimension of the course.
Goal for this Workshop:
To guide you in the development of a plan for a
system of reflection-assignments for your course
Overview of workshop:
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Assumptions and definitions
Types of Reflection assignments
Ways to grade reflections assignments
Discussions
Primary Assumption:
“An ounce of experience is better than a ton of
theory simply because it is only in experience that
any theory has vital and verifiable significance. An
experience, even a very humble experience, is
capable of generating and carrying any amount of
theory (or intellectual content), but a theory apart
from an experience cannot be definitely grasped
even as a theory. It tends to become a mere verbal
formula . . .”
-- Robert Bringle and Julie Hatcher
Reflection is NOT
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Vague, inward reverie
Stream-of-consciousness diary entries
Solitary
Therapeutic
Personal opinion (unavailable to evaluation)
Busy-work
Instead, reflection should be
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Analytical
Structured and Structuring
Continuous
Collaborative
Synthetic
Documentary
Public
Graded
Analytical:
Require students, in reflection, to . . .
• Look at experience “through the lens” of
assigned reading, and vice-versa: what new
details become important and why?
• Identify problems or conflicts – within reading
or at site, or between reading(s) and site(s)
• Delineate the key components of problems
and dismantle ill-structured problems
Structured and Structuring
• Regular, short, low-stakes reflections should
link each week’s reading to service experience
• Larger, high-stakes reflections should assess
the service-experience in light of the course
goals and build on the shorter reflections
• Feedback from peers, from professor, and
from community partner should shape
upcoming reflections – regularly and
systematically
Continuous,
because . . .
• It thereby becomes habitual in students, not
an artificial “add-on” after most of the work of
the semester is finished
• It thereby provides invaluable opportunity to
“trouble-shoot” the service project as it
unfolds and open the way for immediate
correctives
Synthetic: it leads students to make
connections . . .
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Between different readings
Between readings and service-experiences
Between different service-experiences
And thereby to build a coherent body of new
knowledge derived from diverse elements –
actively, creatively, analytically, even
argumentatively
Documentary
• Can be archived and used as readings in future
iterations of the course
• Can be revisited by the students themselves in
later projects (both academic and professional)
• Can be used in an on-going way by community
partner (in grant applications, in out-reach…)
• Can thereby strengthen in a material way the tie
between the course and the community partner
and help to sustain this tie, even create a shared
“history”
Public:
when transparent, academic work can
• Preserve the dynamic between the course and
the community partner beyond the end of the
semester
• Give students a sense of meaningful and
potentially open-ended audience beyond the
person who awards their grade for semester
• Radicalize students’ consciousness of their own
subject-position in wider community, beyond
Tulane “bubble”
Graded
• So that students will take it seriously
• So that it can foster more dialogue between
student and professor
• So that its relation to course goals can be
actualized in direct ways
Types of Reflection Assignments
• At the beginning of semester
• Throughout the semester
• At the end of the semester
Beginning of Semester
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Interpreting course goals
Documenting first impressions
Articulating key questions or anxieties
Delineating contractual obligations
Throughout semester
• Weekly Discussion Board posts that link
quotes from reading and anecdotes about
service experience
• Weekly Double-entry journal that comment, in
one column on reading, and in the other
about service-experience
• Weekly Critical Incident logs that describe and
analyze problematic or surprising moments.
At end of semester
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Class presentations
Reflective narratives
Group collaborations
Videos
Facebook Pages
Public Showcases
Grading: a 4-part rubric
1. Quotes from reading are
numerous, well-integrated
less numerous, less integrated
not there or merely imposed
2. Service-experience is described/narrated
in complex detail
more superficially
not at all
Rubric cont’d . . .
3. Engages course goals
in meaningful depth
more sporadically
not at all
4. Evinces significant develop as
a person
a citizen
an intellectual
a professional
Break-Out Session